Store managers are given tight labor budgets and incentivized to
understaff stores, which makes it difficult to
staff workers on regular schedules, according to the Times
report.

“The mood lately has not been superpositive; they’ve been cutting
labor pretty drastically,” Matthew Haskins, a shift supervisor at
a Starbucks in Seattle, told the Times. “There are many days when
we find ourselves incredibly — not even a skeletal staff, just
short-staffed.”

Another barista, Ciara Moran, told the Times that the
Starbucks in Connecticut where she worked until recently is
suffering from a "severe understaffing problem," largely due to
the fact that it had no assistant manager to deal with employee
complaints.

As a result, complaints were typically brought to the store
manager, who had "too much on her plate" to find a resolution,
Moran told the newspaper.

A third barista who works at a Starbucks in Georgia told the
Times that so-called "clopenings" — where an employee has to
close a store late at night and return the next morning to open
it — have happened at her store because the manager trusts only a
few employees to handle closings.

Starbucks didn't respond to a request for comment on this
story.

A spokeswoman for the coffee chain told the Times that
all baristas now get their schedules 10 days in advance.

"We’re the first to admit we have work to do. ... But
we feel like we’ve made good progress, and that doesn’t align
with what we’re seeing," she said.